The 
Creative  Workman 


An  Address  Delivered  Before  The  Technical 

Association  of  the  Pulp  and  Paper  Industry 

at  the  Spring  Meeting,  held  at  Dayton,  Ohio, 

May  16,  1918 


By  ROBERT  B.  WOLF, 

Manager,  Spanish  River  Pulp  and  Paper  Mills,  Ltd. 
Sault  Ste.  Marie,  Ontario,  Canada 


Technical  Association  of  the  Pulp  and  Paper  Industry 

117  East  Twenty-fourth  Street 

New  York 

1918 

REMOVED  TO 
542  FIFTH  A 


MEW 


The  Creative  Workman 


I  se  of  Individual  Progress  Records  as  a  Means  of  Making  Work  Interesting  and  Enjoyable 

By  ROBERT  B.  WOLF 
Manager,  Spanish  River  Pulp  and  Paper  Mills,  Ltd.,  Sault    Ste.  Marie,  Ont. 


(>DKRN  industry  has  to  a  great  extent 
made  life  in  our  large  manufacturing 
plants  almost  unbearably  mechanical. 
As  a  result,  the  workmen  are  in  many 
cases  in  open  rebellion  against  the  en- 
tire system.  The  trouble  arises  clear- 
ly from  a  lack  of  realization  of  what 
human  life  is  for.  Therefore,  an  ana- 
lysis of  the  qualities  in  work  which 
attract  or  repel  us  would  surely  be  most  helpful  and, 
if  carried  far  enough,  should  reveal  something  of  the 
meaning  of  life  and  of  the  individual's  relationship 
to  his  whole  environment. 

The  success  we  have  had  in  making  the  work  of  our 
paper  machines  interesting  and  therefore  attractive  to 
our  machine  operators  will,  I  feel  sure,  prove  helpful 
to  others  who  are  endeavoring  to  solve  the  individual 
problem.  At  any  rate,  it  is  a  great  pleasure  to  us  to 
see  how  our  men  are  beginning  to  enjoy  work  which, 
before  the  introduction  of  progress  records,  was  not 
particularly  attractive.  The  philosophy  underlying 
our  experience  is,  of  course,  not  in  any  sense  confined 
to  the  paper  industry,  and  from  previous  experience 
I  know  can  be  widely  extended.  No  philosophy  of 
life,  however,  is  valuable,  unless  it  is  capable  of 
practical  application,  so  I  hope  the  illustrations  which 
follow  will  prove  to  be  of  real  value  as  a  concrete 
demonstration  of  the  principles  involved. 

The  development  of  this  philosophy  was  based  upon 
results  obtained  in  The  Burgess  Sulphite  Fibre  Com- 
pany's mills  at  Berlin,  N.  H.  There  we  were  making 
sulphite  pulp  with  its  accompanying  by-products,  and 
had  recorded  almost  all  the  operations  in  the  process. 
We  had,  however,  no  experience  in  that  plant  with 
the  recording  of  operations  on  paper  machines,  so 
when  we  started  our  work  at  the  Sturgeon  Falls  plant 
of  The  Spanish  River  Co.,  we  decided  to  undertake 
this  investigation,  especially  as  we  were  having  con- 
siderable trouble  with  uneven  weights  of  paper.  We 
determined  to  go  at  this  problem  from  the  quality 
basis,  as  our  experience  at  the  "Burgess"  plant  had 
been  that  the  quality  records  were  the  most  important. 
Quantity  records  we  found  usually  tended  to  make 
hard  feeling  among  the  men,  as  many  of  you  have 
probably  observed,  where  one  machine  crew  disputes 
with  another  because  of  a  difference  of  opinion  as  to 
who  should  be  credited  with  a  roll  at  the  end  of  the 
shift.  I  found  thai  the  international  officers  of  the 
Paper  Makers  Union  felt  very  much  the  same  way 
about  it  and  were  inclined  to  be  instinctively  opposed 
to  the  posting  of  production  records.  Quality  records, 
however,  are  of  a  different  nature,  as  they  bring  into 
play  the  reasoning,  thinking  power  of  man  much  more 
than  quantity  records ;  the  latter  reflect  the  physical 
side  of  his  nature  rather  than  the  intellectual  side. 
Wherever  the  competition  is  on  a  quality  basis,  co- 
operation results,  and  cooperation  of  this  nature  does 
not  diminish  the  spirit  of  emulation  but  on  the  con- 
trary tends  to  strengthen  it. 

Before  referring  to  the  illustrations  which  show  in 
concrete  form  our  results,  I  believe  it  will  be  helpful 


to  review  our  general  philosophy  of  management. 
I  sincerely  hope  what  I  sa.y  will  be  looked  upon  as 
simply  my  own  interpretation  of  the  facts  as  we 
have  observed  them,  and  even  though  I  may  seem  to 
be  dogmatic  at  times,  that  you  will  be  indulgent  and 
consider  this  as  possibly  an  inherent  defect  of  any 
individual  interpretation  of  a  vital  process.  I  feel 
that  our  experiences  stand  out  only  as  so  many  isolated 
and  disconnected  fragments  unless  we  are  able  to  con- 
nect them  by  a  process  of  reflection  into  a  philosophical 
concept.  It  is  this  concept  of  a  law  or  principle  which 
we  can  pass  on  to  others,  and  it  is  useful  in  propor- 
tion as  it  is  practical.  If  it  does  not  fit  into  the 
general  scheme  of  life  it  is  not  worth  our  serious  con- 
sideration. On  the  other  hand,  if  it  does  prove  its 
practical  value,  its  presentation  adds  something  to  the 
sum  total  of  human  happiness.  It  is  with  this  thought 
in  mind,  therefore,  that  I  am  taking  the  liberty  of 
weaving  a  philosophy  of  management  around  the  con- 
crete facts  of  our  paper  machine  operations. 

The  basic  principle  of  our  philosophy  is  that  a 
man  must  be  interested  in  his  work  in  order  to  get 
good  results.  If  he  is  not  interested,  he  will  not  do 
his  best.  He  is  simply  in  this  case  reacting  to  ex- 
ternally applied  force  or  stimulation,  and  is  doing  his 
work  more  because  he  is  compelled  to  do  it,  from  fear 
of  either  losing  his  iob  or  being  penalized  in  some 
way.  A  man  in  this  frame  of  mind  cannot  do  his  best 
work  and  will  really  do  as  little  as  possible.  If  the 
work  is  interesting,  however,  he  works  "from  within 
out"  as  it  were,  because  he  desires  to  do  so  and  not 
because  someone  is  all  the  time  "following  him  up." 
This  type  of  worker  is  what  we  call  the  creative  type 
and  a  plant  is  successful  in  direct  proportion  to  the 
number  of  men  that  it  has  of  this  type. 

Is  the  discontent  and  restlessness  in  and  around  our 
great  over-specialized  industrial  plants  (in  spite  of 
their  so  called  welfare  work)  not  due  to  the  fact  that 
•  the  creative  impulse  of  the  worker  has  no  chance  to 
develop  in  them?  Efficiency  it  seems  to  me  has  too 
often  been  made  an  end  in  itself  to  be  attained  at  all 
costs  regardless  of  individual  wellbeing.  In  many  of 
our  mills  and  factories  men  are  used  simply  as  in- 
'telligent  machines  and  are  given  no  opportunity  to  use 
their  thinking  powers.  Regardless  of  how  seeminglv 
•  well  operated  a  plant  of  this  kind  may  be,  how  can  it 
even  approach  a  maximum  of  good  results  if  05  per- 
cent of  its  employees  are  not  permitted  to  use  their 
brains  in  their  work?  Does  this  form  of  industrialism 
differ  very  materially  from  that  of  the  older  mcdia?v;il 
.  form  of  industrial  slavery  which  Germany  has  so 
efficiently  brought  up  to  date?  It  is  no  accident 
that  practically  the  entire  working  world  is  willing 
to  make  untold  sacrifices  to  crush  out  this  giant 
organization  which  seeks  to  dominate  by  repression, 
and  it  seems  to  me  that  the  only  way  that  we  can 
avoid  a  deadlock  in  this  present  war  is  to  concentrate 
our  efforts  to  organize  without  repression  and  remove 
from  the  face  of  the  earth  forever  the  pernicious 
doctrine  of  the  "divine  right  of  kings."  This  war  has 

445J64 


THE  CKI'.AI  ll'li  WORKMAN 


'.  Keep-  £alH>d,  -an  industrial  war  —  a  war  of  machine 
power.  If  this  is  so,  how  long  can  Germany  hold  out 
when  she  is  using  only  about  5  percent  of  her  people 
in  creative  work?  If  we  have  the  intelligence  to 
organize  our  industries  so  that  ten  times  this  percent- 
age are  using  their  brains,  we  can  set  in  motion  such 
intensely  powerful  forces  that  the  German  machine 
will  be  absolutely  unable  to  withstand  them.  Can  this 
be  done?  I  believe  our  experiences  show  that  if 
granted  their  undeniable  right  to  work  intelligently, 
even  a  larger  percentage  than  the  50  percent  suggested 
above  will  do  creative  work. 

As  an  indication  of  the  low  percentage  of  creative 
power  used  by  the  Germans,  I  will  cite  two  industries 
which  are  typical.  Over  two  years  ago  one  of  the 
directors  of  a  great  transatlantic  steamship  corpora- 
tion told  me  that  in  twenty  years  to  his  own  knowledge 
no  basic  invention  in  shipbuilding  had*come  out  of 
Germany.  They  have  analyzed  and  refined  what 
others  have  created  but  that  is  all.  The  same  is  true 
in  the  steel  and  iron  industry,  so  I  was  informed  a 
few  days  ago  by  the  head  of  one  of  America's  greatest 
steel  corporations. 

We  recognize  in  our  work  three  fields  of  operation. 
The  FIRST  we  may  call  the  "field  of  nature,"  and 
such  sciences  as  chemistry,  physics  and  mechanics  re- 
cord the  operations  in  this  field.  All  that  these 
sciences  do  is  to  organize  the  observed  facts  in  the 
physical  world  and  by  means  of  this  organization  re- 
cord the  laws  of  the  various  physical  elements  which 
make  up  the  raw  materials.  The  laws  of  the  raw  ma- 
terials and  the  effects  of  the  various  manufacturing 
processes  upon  these  raw  materials  must  be  recorded 
if  we  are  properly  to  enlist  into  the  service  what  we 
recognize  as  the  SECOND  great  field  of  industrial 
operation,  namely,  "the  will  of  man." 

The  realm  of  so  called  "exact  science,"  does  not  ex- 
tend to  this  field.  It  is  only  in  proportion  as  we  are  able 
to  give  to  man  the  greatest  possible  amount  of  knowl- 
edge of  the  first  field  and  to  create  conditions  where 
he  can  use  this  knowledge  in  constructive,  imaginative 
work,  that  good  results  are  obtained.  It  is  begin- 
ning to  be  recognized  today  that  we  cannot  drive  men 
to  do  work  against  their  will  and  obtain  anything 
like  the  best  operating  conditions  in  our  plants.  The 
thing  that  a  man  does  unwillingly  he  is  not  interested 
in  and  will  not  do  well ;  neither  will  he  do  good  work 
if  he  is  indifferent  as  to  whether  the  work  is  well  per- 
formed or  not.  The  problem  is  how  to  produce  a  de- 
sire upon  the  part  of  the  workman  to  do  the  work  for 
its  own  sake.  Our  experience  has  shown  that  this  can 
be  done  when  conditions  in  the  plant  permit  him  to 
use  the  creative  power  of  his  intellect  and  thereby 
become  the  conscious  director  of  the  natural  forces 
that  he  is  using.  It  is  not  only  necessary,  however,  to 
give  this  originating,  choosing  and  adapting  power  of 
the  intellect  a  chance  to  operate,  but  if  we  are  to 
invoke  it  to  the  greatest  degree,  we  must  record — in- 
sofar as  it  is  practical — each  man's  progress.  The  pro- 
gress record,  as  indicated  by  the  score,  is  the  thing 
which  makes  a  game  interesting  and  the  pleasure  we 
derive  from  a  game  comes  largely  from  the  conscious- 
ness that  we  are  matching  our  own  intelligence  against 
the  other  man's  intelligence.  It  is  for  this  reason  that 
in  quality  records  we  get,  exactly  as  we  do  in  games,  a 
spirit  of  fair  play  and  friendly  competition,  rather  than 
the  hard  unfriendly  feeling  which  comes  when  the  rec- 
ords are  mainly  those  of  production  or  quantity  only. 

The  THIRD  field  has  to  do  with   the  "spirit  of 


unity"  in  the  organization  which  men  call  esprit  '/<•' 
corps.  It  is  invoked  largely  through  teaching  each 
man  his  part  in  the  organization  by  enabling  him  to 
become  conscious  of  the  effect  of  his  acts  upon  every 
other  part  of  the  organization.  It  is  not  enough  to 
teach  a  man  his  own  work  well  and  to  create  an  en- 
vironment in  which  he  can  obtain  the  best  results  on 
his  own  job,  but  he  should  realize  the  effect  of  his 
work  on  every  part  of  tlu-  organization  and,  therefore, 
his  relationship  to  the  whole.  It  is,  of  course,  largely 
the  function  of  the  executive  branch  consciously  to 
develop  this  spirit  of  unity,  but  this  spirit  must  be 
developed  if  the  best  results  are  to  be  obtained. 

In  Philadelphia  a  few  days  ago,  I  heard  the  head 
of  one  of  our  large  shipbuilding  corporations,  when 
asked  how  he  got  such  splendid  results  in  his  plant, 
reply  that  80  percent  of  the  results  were  due  to  the 
spirit  of  the  men.  He  added,  however,  that  this  spirit 
is  largely  emotional  and  therefore  apt  to  change  sud- 
denly. It  is  this  very  spirit  of  enthusiasm  which,  if 
properly  directed,  overcomes  all  obstacles,  and  the 
great  problem  in  management  is  how  to  develop  it 
rationally  and  in  constantly  increasing  proportion. 
What  I  hope  to  point  out  to  you  today  is 
that  if  we  are  to  perpetuate  this  spirit,  it  will 
be  by  showing  how  these  strong  emotions  -'can 
be  controlled  by  the  mind  through  the  vise  of 
the  intellect  and  that  if  we  intelligently  build  up  in 
our  plants  many  individual  progress  records,  which 
not  only  inform  each  man  of  his  own  progress  but  also 
of  the  effect  of  his  work  on  others  working  with  him, 
we  will  have  something  tangible  which  men  can  recog- 
nize as  the  result  of  their  unfolding  spiritual  conscious- 
ness, which  is  the  mainspring  of  every  one's  activity. 
•I  do  not  mean  by  this  that  all  of  our  activity  should 
be  purely  intellectual,  but  that  by  the  use  of  the  in- 
tellect we  must  learn  to  control  .  our  emotions 
if  the  great  power  stored  up  in  the  emotional  nature 
is  to  be  used  in  constructive  work  for  the  advance- 
ment of  the  human  race.  Instead  of  poking  fun  at 
anything  intellectual,  why  not  get  over  this  prejudice 
by  recognizing  the  intellect  as  simply  the  instrument 
used  by  the  mind  ?  What  we  all  do  is  simply  to  select 
from  our  outer  experiences  (the  field  of  our  activity) 
what  it  is  we  wish  to  leave  our  impression  upon;  then 
by  the  use  of  our  intelligence  (intellect)  we  make  up 
our  minds  what  course  to  follow.  This  is  no  "high 
brow  stunt,"  but  just  plain  coinmonsense. 

It  is  necessary,  if  an  industry  is  to  make  genuine 
progress,  that  a  real  science  of  the  industry  be  built  up. 
So  far  we  have  been  very  largely  concerned  with 
the  art  of  making  paper  and  not  with  the  science. 
I  am  afraid  that  we  have  forgotten  that  we  can  only 
have  a  great  art  where  the  organized  facts,  which  re- 
cord the  science,  are  so  complete  and  comprehensive 
that  the  individual  who  wishes  to  express  this  art 
can  master  the  laws  as  recorded  in  the  science.  As  it 
has  been  so  well  expressed  by  A.  F.  Sheldon,  "Sci- 
ence is  organized  facts,"  and  "Art  is  a  science  prac- 
tised," so  that  unless  we  can  organize  the  facts  under- 
lying the  industry — the  chemistry,  physics  and  me- 
chanics of  the  process — it  will  be  impossible  for  the 
men  in  the  industry  properly  to  express  the  art.  The 
art,  however,  must  be  expressed  not  only  through  the 
emotions  but  also  by  the  mind  throu^li  tin-  use  of  the 
intellect. 

Is  not  the  reason  it  has  taken  so  long  to  learn  a 
trade,  in  the  great  majority  of  cases,  that  there  is  no 
science  of  the  trade  where  a  man  can  studv  the  natural 


Till'.  CREATIVE  WORKM.l\ 
REEL      RECORD 


TOUR  NO.  / 


MACHINE  NO. 


MACHINE  TENDER 


DATE      Oct.          /€  191  7" 


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7S.S     73.3 


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7X  7      73.  7 


tbn 


THE  CREATIVE  WOKKM.IX 


laws  of  the  process.  In  most  trades  the  workman 
must  see  everything  actually  happen  before  he  can 
tell  what  to  do  in  an  emergency  and  this  of  necessity 
takes  a  long  time.  It  is  the  length  of  time  required  for 
a  man  to  develop  himself  into  an  all-round  craftsman 
that  is,  perhaps,  one  of  the  main  reasons  \-liy  the 
employer  has  resorted  to  those  methods  of  extreme 
specialization  which  the  workmen  are  certainly  justi- 
fied in  resenting. 

The  trade  school  movement,  as  it  is  developing  in 
this  country,  gives  great  promise  of  correcting  the 
evils  of  the  present  system  of  education  which  in  the 
past  has  taken  so  little  account  of  the  practical  arts. 

With  us  the  movement  is  the  direct  opposite  of  the 
Prussian  system  which  fits  the  man  into  a  predeterm- 
ined place  in  the  industrial  machine,  for  our  system 
aims  to  help  him  find  the  kind  of  work  he  desires  to 
do  and  is  best  fitted  for.  In  the  past  the  industrial 
system  has  been  mainly  used  to  exploit  men  and  this 
misuse  of  the  industrial  organization  has  perhaps 
been  largely  responsible  for  the  apparent  failure  of 
the  democratic  form  of  government.  The  great  prob- 
lem is  how  to  unite  men  without  crushing  them,  and 
the  answer  to  this  problem  will  not  come  from  the 
politicians  and  lawyers,  but  from  those  who  are  mas- 
ters of  material  forces  and  therefore  know  the  law. 
We  are  to  recognize  at  last  that  the  real  reason  for 
the  existence  of  industry  is  to  form  a  field  for  the 
development  of  the  human  race. 

We  should  begin  to  look  upon  our  industrial  insti- 
tutions as  primarily  educational  in  nature ;  for  educa- 
tion does  not  consist  simply  in  the  acquiring  of  facts 
by  a  process  of  accumulation  and  then  making  no  use 
of  them.  Real  education  is  not  only  proper  nourish- 
ment of  the  mind,  but  proper  use  of  the  mind ;  in  other 
words,  there  must  be  expression  as  well  as  impres- 
sion. 

So  it  seems  to  me  that  if  we  look  at  our  industrial 
institutions  from  this  point  of  view  we  will  see  that 
the  process  of  education  is  continuous  throughout  life, 
as  indeed  it  should  be,  for  it  not  only  means  equality 
of  opportunity  for  all  but  knowledge  of  individual 
capacity  which  is  more  important  still.  The  old  idea 
that  education  ends  with  our  graduation  from  school 
or  college,  has  to  be  replaced  by  the  saner  conception 
that  this  preliminary  training  really  only  stimulates  a 
desire  for  knowledge  by  furnishing  us  with  a  means 
for  knowing  how  to  acquire  more  knowledge. 

Some  of  our  so-called  learned  men  exhibit  the  least 
amount  of  intelligence  and  therefore  in  reality  have 
the  poorest  education.  A  man  does  not  have  to 
be  a  college  man  or  a  high  school  graduate  to  be 
educated.  In  fact  some  of  our  greatest  scientists 
have  never  been  to  college.  They  obtained  their 
education  in  -the  school  of  life.  Any  man  who 
keeps  an  open  mind,  free  from  prejudice,  and 
is  intelligently  inquiring  into  the  reason  why  things 
happen  as  they  do,  is  educating  himself.  He  is  study- 
ing nature's  forces  in  action,  and,  if  he  intelligently 
inquires  why  they  act  naturally  as  far  as  they  do,  he 
will  learn  how  to  create  the  special  conditions  to  make 
them  go  further.  It  was  because  man  observed  things 
which  floated  in  a  natural  way  that  he  was  able  to 
discover  the  law  that  "anything  which  bulk  for  bulk 
was  lighter  than  the  water  it  displaced  would  float." 
He  was  then  able  to  begin  the  organization  of  the  facts 
which  make  up  the  science  of  shipbuilding.  He  now 
makes  iron  float  by  the  use  of  the  very  same  law  by 
which  it  sinks.  We  can  see  then  how  man,  by  the  use 


of  his  intellect,  creates  a  set  of  conditions  which  do 
not  occur  spontaneously  in  nature — nature  serves  him 
in  proportion  to  his  knowledge  of  her  laws — an  educa- 
tion is  nothing  more  or  less  than  obtaining  a  knowledge 
of  natural  law. 

We  are  wasting  one  of  the  greatest  oportunities  for 
the  development  of  the  human  race  when  we  so  design 
our  industries  that  a  man  ceases  to  consciously  accumu- 
late experiences  and  simply  becomes  an  automaton  in 
the  performance  of  his  day's  work.  When  we  recog- 
nize the  fact  that  the  intelligence  of  an  institution  is  but 
the  sum  of  the  intelligences  of  its  individual  members, 
we  will  see  how  absolutely  essential  it  is  that  we  make 
our  main  object  the  development  of  man  power.  If 
the  men  are  right,  the  plant  can  not  help  being  right. 

The  idea  that  one  man  can  arbitrarily  dominate  an 
organization  and  drive  it  as  he  wills  is  fast  giving 

•  place  to  the  saner  conception  that  the  manager  must 
lead  and  not  drive,  and  he  is  successful  in  proportion 
as  he  encourages  those  entrusted  to  his  charge  to  work 
out  things  for  themselves.    He  must  learn  to  delegate 
authority  and  not  try  to  hold  it  all  in  his  own  hands. 
Why  not,  therefore,  recognize  the  fact  that,  if  it  is 
necessary    for   the    manager   to    throw    responsibility 
upon  his  superintendents,  department  heads  and  fore- 

•  men,   it   is   equally   necessary   to   place   responsibility 
upon  the  individual  worker  as  well  ?     Contrary  to  the 
commonly  accepted  impression,  it  has  been  our  ex- 
perience that  men  crave  responsibility.    My  own  belief 
is  that  no  stable  form  of  society  will  be  secured  until 
our  industries  are  so  designed  that  workmen  feel  this 
responsibility.    They  can  become  responsible  members 
of  society  only  when   they  are  responsible  members 
of  industry,  for  the  obvious  reason  that  the  unthink- 

•  ing  man  is  not  a  responsible  man. 

My  personal  feeling  is  that  the  main  reason  why 
labor  organizations  have  been  formed  is  to  prevent 
the  exploitation  of  their  members.  Men  do  not  want 
to  be  made  into  machines  and  the  reason  there  is  the 
constant  demand  for  shorter  hours  and  more  pay  is 
that  men  desire  to  get  away  from  the  deadening  same- 
ness of  the  work  which  is  destructive  to  individuality. 
They  feel  that  the  trend  of  modern  industry  is 
more  and  more  to  make  automatons  of  them  and  that 
this  tendency  is  inevitable.  Therefore,  the  only  pos- 
sible chance  for  individual  development  of  the  men  is 
outside  of  the  mere  routine  of  the  workshop.  They 
forget,  however,  that  the  work  by  which  man  lives 
must  in  the  very  nature  of  things  furnish  him  with 
an  opportunity  for  self-expression  and  that  if  the  ele- 
ment of  joy  in  work  is  lacking  from  his  daily  task, 
the  man's  life  will  be  anything  but  full  and  complete 
(as  it  is  destined  to  be).  It  is  only  when  employers 
recognize  this  condition  and  earnestly  strive  to 
remedy  it,  that  there  will  be  any  relief  from  the  pres- 
ent industrial  unrest.  It  might  be  proper  to  explain 
right  here  that  I  did  not  reach  this  conclusion  by  read- 
ing books  on  philosophy  or  political  economy,  but  by 
actual  contact  with  the  men.  I  have  had  twenty-two 
years  experience  as  both  workman  and  employer  and 
have  talked  with  men  individually  and  collectively 
through  our  labor  organizations,  and  invariably  when 
I  mention  making  the  work  interesting  and  enjoyable 
the  suggestion  is  welcomed  with  enthusiasm. 

While  men  must  be  fully  paid  for  the  services  they 
render  and  must  have  sufficient  time  for  recreation 
and  leisure,  it  is  nevertheless  true  that  shorter  hours 
and  more  pay  b\-  themselves  will  not  solve  our  labor 
problems.  Joy  in  work  is  equally  essential,  and  this 


THE  CREATIVE  WORKMAN 


cannot  be  made  real  unless  the  workman  has  an  oppor- 
tunity to  learn  to  express  consciously  that  which  is 
unique  and  individual  within  himself. 

Before  giving  you  actual  illustrations  I  would  like 
to  explain  the  causes  leading  up  to  our  decision  to 
keep  these  records.  In  the  first  place,  the  publishers 
are  very  particular  about  the  weight  of  the  paper  they 
use.  A  ream  24x36 — 500  sheets — should  weigh  ex- 
actly 32  pounds,  as  this  is  the  standard  weight  for 
newspaper.  If  the  paper  runs  lighter  than  this,  it  is 
apt  to  cause  breaks  in  the  pressroom  and  if  it  runs 
heavier,  a  publisher  will  not  be  able  to  get  as  many 
editions  out  of  a  ton  and  his  paper  cost  will  increase 
in  proportion.  It  is  also  true  that  if  the  paper  is  over- 
dried  on  the  machine  it  becomes  brittle  and,  therefore, 
breaks  easily  in  running  over  the  printing  press.  In 
addition,  the  dryness  makes  it  impossible  for  the  sheet 
to  take  a  good  finish  and.  as  a  result  the  surface  will 
"fuzz  up"  and  fine  particles  will  come  off  on  the  type 
of  the  printing  presses  and  cause  trouble,  especially 
with  the  cuts,  by  filling  up  the  fine  corrugations  or 
meshes.  Therefore,  the  main  problem  is  to  make  an 
"•absolutely  uniform  weight  of  paper,  which  has  a  good 
finish  and  at  the  same  time  elasticity  without  the  ob- 
jectionable fuzziness. 

In  the  ordinary  course  of  events,  the  publisher 
makes  a  vigorous  complaint  to  the  sales  office  who 
will  pass  the  complaint  along  to  the  manager's  office. 
We  then  take  the  matter  up  with  the  superintendent 
and  he  in  turn  passes  the  "kick"  along  to  his  assist- 
ant, who  passes  it  along  to  the  boss  machinetender, 
until  it  finally  reaches  the  machinetender  or  backten- 
der  or  any  member  of  the  crew  who  is  responsible. 
Things  will  go  along  fairly  well  for  a  time  and  then 
the  process  is  repeated  and  each  time  we  have  to 
think  of  a  new  way  of  expressing  the  same  old  "kick." 
\Ye  made  up  our  minds,  therefore,  that  the  trouble 
was  due  largely  to  a  lack  of  interest  on  the  part  of  the 
men  operating  the  machines  in  keeping  the  operating 
conditions  where  they  should  be  to  eliminate  com- 
plaints, and  that  this  lack  of  interest  came  largely 
from  their  lack  of  knowledge  as  to  what  the  conditions 
actually  were;  in  other  words,  there  were  not  enough 
samples  taken  of  the  sheet  as  it  was  operating  on 
the  machine  to  inform  the  machine  crew  of  what  was 
occurring.  The  ordinary  method  is  for  the  backten- 
dcr  to  take  a  sample  off  each  reel,  and  weigh  it  and 
let  the  machinetender  know  the  results.  The  machine- 
tender  then  turns  on  or  shuts  off  stock  according  to 
whether  the  sample  is  light  or  heavy.  A  sample  from 
the  front,  middle  and  back  of  the  sheet  is  taken  occa- 
sionally, but  as  a  rule  not  as  often  as  it  should  be 
in  order  to  get  the  most  uniform  results.  Realizing 
that  the  problem  was  to  produce  a  desire  upon  the'part 
of  the  machine  crew  to  get  the  results  we  were  after, 
we  put  on  to  each  shift,  a  man  (one  for  every  two  ma- 
chines) whose  duty  it  is  to  take  a  sample  every  time  a 
reel  is  changed  (once  in  every  30  or  40  minutes),  from 
the  front,  middle  and  back  of  the  sheet.  These  three 
samples  are  weighed  and  recorded  as  indicated  on  the 
form  shown  on  Plate  i,  reproduced  herewith. 

These  forms,  which  are  kept  in  the  machine  room, 
arc  filled  in  by  the  "sample  tester,"  who  needs  to  be  a 
good,  bright,  intelligent  young  fellow,  quick  and  ac- 
curate with  figures.  While  these  men  are  instructed 
in  the  work  by  the  research  department,  they  are  large- 
ly recruited  from  the  machine  crews  and  in  our  mills 
are  members  of  the  labor  unions.  There  is  no  thought 
in  the  minds  of  our  men  that  this  is  a  "follow-up"  sys- 


tem designed  to  enable  the  management  to  find  fault 
with  the  workman.  They  recognize  it  to  be  a  system 
to  help  them  get  information  which  they  would  not 
have  time  to  get  themselves  and  which  they  must  have 
in  order  to  do  their  work  more  intelligently.  As  you 
will  soon  see,  we  are  recording  the  facts  which  enable 
all  of  us  to  recognize  the  natural  laws  underlying  the 
process. 

The  first  column  marked  "Time"  shows  when  the 
sample  was  taken  (at  the  change  of  the  reel).  The 
second  column  gives  the  continuous  reel  numbers  for 
the  shifts  (the  process  is  continuous — three  8-hour 
shifts  in  twenty- four  hours).  The  next  column  was 
designed  originally  to  "tie  up"  the  reel  number  to  the 
numbers  of  the  rolls  made  from  each  reel  in  order  to 
enable  us  to  trace  responsibility  for  complaints,  but  as 
the  uniformity  of  results  obtained  later  made  this  un- 
necessary, we  abandoned  its  use  and  used  this  column 
to  record  the  "Uniformity  Record,"  which  will  be 
explained  later. 

The  next  main  column  marked  "Weight  of  Sam- 
ple" shows  under  the  headings  I,  2  and  3  the  weight 
of  the  samples  of  paper  taken  at  the  front,  middle 
and  back  of  the  sheet,  respectively  (taken  across  the 
machine).  On  our  medium-width  machines  at  Espa- 
nola  we  planned  to  take  four  samples  and  on  the  wide 
machines  at  the  "Soo"  five  samples  instead  of  only 
three  as  on  these  narrow  machines  at  Sturgeon  Falls; 
hence  the  reason  for  the  five  columns. 

The  first  entries  on  the  upper  line  are  the  exact 
weights  (on  a  ream  basis)  of  each  of  the  three  samples 
taken,  and  the  first  entry  under  the  main  column 
headed  "Total  Weight"  is  the  average  of  the  three 
samples.  All  of  the  other  figures  in  the  "Total 
Weight"  column  explain  themselves.  It  is  only  neces- 
sary to  remark  that  they  are  for  the  purpose  of  deter- 
mining the  average  weights  and  weights  to  date  for 
the  shift. 

These  figures  are  plotted  on  the  chart  at  the  bottom 
of  the  sheet  marked  "Basis  Weight,"  and  thereby  en- 
able the  machine  tender  to  visualize  quickly  what  he 
is  doing.  The  32ib  weight  is  drawn  in  as  a  heavy  line 
so  a  quick  comparison  with  the  ideal  standard  can  be 
made. 

Before  explaining  the  other  figures  on  the  chart,  it 
is  necessary  to  tell  you  the  facts  leading  up  to  their 
inclusion  in  our  records.  When  we  first  talked  with 
our  men  about  recording  the  "basis  weight"  in  this 
way,  they  called  our  attention  to  the  fact  that  the  rec- 
ord of  basis  weight  alone  would  not  be  sufficient; 
that  the  moisture  in  the  sheet  should  also  be  recorded. 
Our  research  department  then  worked  out  the  details 
of  the  plan,  but  the  most  valuable  suggestions  came 
from  one  of  the  international  officers  of  the  Paper 
Makers'  Union.  We  built  a  small  drying  oven  which 
was  placed  close  to  the  work  table  where  the  sample 
cutler  arid  scales  are  located,  and  as  soon  as  a  sample 
is  weighed  it  is  marked  and  immediately  placed  in 
this  oven  and  dried  to  bone-dryness.  (This  takes 
about  10  minutes.)  It  is  again  weighed  and  the  fig- 
ures entered  in  the  "Weight  of  Sample"  column  just 
under  its  original  weight.  From  a  direct  reading  ta- 
ble, it  is  easy  to  compute  the  moisture  test  of  each  sam- 
ple which  is  entered  in  the  "Percent  of  Moisture" 
column  under  "Roll."  The  average  of  the  three  is 
entered  under  "Reel."  The  average  to  date  for  the 
shift  is  then  computed  exactly  as  in  the  case  of  the 
"Total  Weight"  column. 

This  moisture  test   is  then  plotted  on  the  bottom 


THE  CREATIVE  WORKMAN 

IMC  WO.   .  /  MACHINE  TCMDCR 


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1'I.ATF.    II 

6 


THE  CREATIVE  WORKMAN 


GRE6S  RECORD 


9S.Z 


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PROOREBS  RECORD 


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PLATE   III 

7 


THE  CREATIVE  WORKMAN 


chart  sheet  marked  "Moisture  Test."  This,  of  course, 
proved  to  be  a  wonderful  help  to  the  back  tender, 
whose  work  it  is  to  regulate  the  steam  pressure  on 
the  drying  cylinders.  Before  this  plan  to  give  the 
exact  moisture  test  was  put  into  execution,  the  only 
way  the  backtender  could  tell  anything  about  the 
moisture  content  of  the  sheet  was  to  "feel"  it  as  it 
passed  from  the  calendar  stack  to  the  reel.  Of  course, 
no  record  of  this  "feel"  could  be  made  to  enable  the 
backtender  to  tell  how  well  his  work  was  being  done, 
so  there  was  no  particular  reason  why  he  should  be 
interested  in  this  part  of  his  work.  It  is  only  the 
exceptional  man  who  has  imagination  enough  to  cre- 
ate within  himself  a  consciousness  of  his  progress. 

Now  this  brings  me  to  the  "Weight  Record"  and 
"Moisture  Record"  columns.  Our  view  is  that  every 
man  is  entitled  to  know  how  well  he  is  doing  his  work 
and  that  it  is  one  of  the  great  moral  obligations  of 
the  management  to  furnish  him  with  a  means  of  re- 
cording his  progress.  Aside  from  the  satisfaction  it 
gives  the  workman  it  is  also  a  means  of  eliminating 
favoritism  from  the  plant,  for  each  man's  record 
speaks  for  itself.  The  modern  industrial  plant  with 
its  specialization  of  functions,  where  each  man  does 
only  a  fractional  part  of  an  operation,  no  longer  al- 
lows the  operator  to  leave  the  impress  of  his  person- 
ality upon  the  work  itself.  In  the  old  days  when  the 
workman  made  the  complete  finished  article,  it  liter- 
ally reflected  his  individuality,  and  being  a  creation 
of  his  own  mind,  he  found  joy  in  its  production.  The 
desire  for  self-expression,  which  is  the  most  funda- 
mental instinct  in  life,  had  been  gratified  through  the 
creation  of  the  article  produced. 

We  must  either  accept  the  illogical  premise  that 
the  combining  of  men  into  large  industrial  production 
units  is  contrary  to  the  natural  law  of  life,  or  we  must 
squarely  face  the  fact  that  this  creative  instinct,  which 
the  old  order  satisfied,  must  be  permitted  in  the  new. 
At  first  sight  this  may  seem  hopeless,  but  on  further 
examination  we  find  this  not  at  all  to  be  the  case.  On  the 
contrary,  because  of  the  wonderful  advance  of  mod- 
ern science  which  has  increased  the  reasoning  power 
of  the  human  mind  to  a  marvelous  extent  there  is 
vastly  more  opportunity  for  the  individual  to  do  cre- 
ative work.  We  must,  however,  begin  to  study  the 
problem  with  an  earnest  desire  to  solve  it,  for  its  solu- 
tion is  the  most  pressing  and  vital  question  before  the 
civilized  world  today.  It  is  with  the  hope  that  these 
examples  will  help  point  a  way  toward  the  solution 
of  this  problem,  that  I  am  offering  them  to  you  for 
your  consideration. 

My  attention  was  called  in  a  striking  manner  to 
the  increasing  interest  taken  in  the  problem  by  the 
public  generally  when  in  Washington  a  few  days  ago. 
While  waiting  for  a  trolley  on  Pennsylvania  avenue 
a  policeman,  waiting  for  the  same  car,  remarked  to 
me  that  the  Capitol  was  a  lively  place  just  now;  to 
which  I  assented,  saying  it  was  perhaps  a  good  thing 
to  wake  up  the  old  crowd  a  bit.  This  apparently  met 
with  his  approval,  for  he  admitted  that  the  government 
employees  really  took  little  interest  in  their  work.  Upon 
asking  him  for  his  explanation  of  this,  he  said — and 
I  am  giving  it  as  nearly  as  I  can  in  his  own  words — 
"The  reason  is,  that  they  don't  have  a  chance  to  ex- 
press their  individuality  in  the  work,  so  it  doesn't  in- 
terest them." 

I  mention  this  incident  to  call  attention  to  the  cir- 
cumstance that  a  great  many  men  are  thinking  along 


these   lines,   and   even   the   policeman   is   becoming   a 
philosopher. 

Man  never  creates  matter  or  force,  but  he  does 
through  his  conscious  mind  create  conditions  for  the 
expansion  and  control  of  these  great  primary  universal 
energies,  and  this  creative  function  has  as  its  instru- 
ment the  originating,  choosing  and  adapting  faculty  of 
the  human  intellect.  Suppress,  or  rather  misdirect  it 
—for  it  cannot  be  suppressed — as  we  are  so  unthink- 
ingly doing  in  the  world  of  modern  industry,  and  we 
are  simply  turning  the  "will  of  man"  into  forces  of 
disintegration,  which  will  eventually  destroy  society. 
The  only  remedy  is  so  to  reorganize  our  business  and 
social  systems  that  the  creative  power  residing  in  the 
"will"  can  become  constructive  and  therefore  coopera- 
tive with  the  great  natural  laws  of  evolution. 
">  The  trouble  with  the  average  employer  is  that  he 
has  been  so  engrossed  in  the  task  of  creating  an  effi- 
cient organization  to  express  his  own  individuality  that 
he  has  entirely  overlooked  the  fact  that  in  the  creation 
of  this  thing  he  has  forgotten  to  extend  the  same 
privilege  to  his  employees.  If  he  only  stops  to  think 
of  it  he  will  recognize  at  once  that  he  cannot  hope  to 
get  the  initiative  of  the  workman  except  by  giving 
him  a  similar  privilege  of  seeing  his  own  creations 
'  grow,  either  by  leaving  the  impress  of  his  personality 
upon  the  article  produced  or  upon  the  progress  record 
of  his  work. 

The  workman  has  combined  against  the  employer 
in  order  to  obtain  the  freedom  which  he  sees  steadily 

*  being  taken  away  from  him,  as  industry  tends  more 
and  more  to  make  automatons  of  men;  and  the  unfor- 
tunate part  of  it  all  is  that  he  has  accepted  in  all  too 
many  cases  the  premise  that  this  tendency  is  logical 

.  and,  therefore,  inevitable. 

The  ideal  of  some  labor  leaders  inclining  toward  the 
socialistic  philosophy  is  that  man  should  be  able  to  pro- 
duce in  a  few  hours  each  day  all  he  needs  to  support 

•  himself  and  his  family,  and  will  then  have  the  rest  of 
the  day  to  do  as  he  pleases. 

This  idea  has  been  strengthened  undoubtedly  by 
the  workmen  seeing  men  who  apparently  do  little  or 
no  productive  work,  profit  out  of  all  proportion  to 
their  efforts.  Does  the  remedy  not  lie  in,  first,  correct- 
ing the  laws  which  create  special  privilege;  and, 
second,  in  making  our  economic  teaching  conform  to 
Ihe  universal  law  of  compensation?  It  can  be  made 
plain  to  all  that  a  man  cannot  safely  consume  more 
than  he  produces,  for  the  law  of  the  conservation  of 
energy  is  as  exact  in  its  operation  in  the  field  of 
economics  as  it  is  in  physics.  I  see  no  reason  why 
these  basic  facts  of  economy  cannot  lie  taught  by 
analogy  to  every  one.  When  they  are  understood, 
men  will  concentrate  their  organized  efforts  upon 
creating  an  environment  which  will  make  work  a 
joyous  thing  and  stop  trying  to  get  away  from  it 
as  so  many  are  now  doing.  The  question  of  pro- 
ducing what  we  need  for  the  full  enjoyment  of 
life  will  then  be  a  long  way  toward  being  solved.  For 
we  will  then  make  the  work  by  means  of  which  we 
earn  our  livelihood,  a  source  of  joy  and  inspiration. 
The  illustrations  will,  I  hope,  give  you  a  hint  of  how 
this  can  be  accomplished,  even  as  industry  in  the  main 
is  today  constituted. 

Does  not  the  reason  that  the  average  employer  is 
opposed  to  labor  unions  lie  in  the  fact  that  he  is  afraid 
that  the  restrictions  which  he  thinks  the  unions  seek 
to  impose  will  take  away  his  own  opportunity  for  self- 
expression  by  preventing  him  from  working  out  his 
8 


THE  CREATIVE  WORKMAN 


'ROOREBB  RECORD 


39-  3 


33.3 


.»>.,..  .0.  / 


PLATE    IV 
9 


Till' 


U'ORKM.IV 


individual  problems  in  his  own  way?  Furthermore, 
if  the  unions  can  demonstrate,  as  they  have  in  our 
plants,  that  this  fear  is  unfounded,  but  that  on  the 
contrary  their  united  cooperative  effort  helps  to  de- 
velop esj>rit  de  corps,  would  not  this  antagonism  on 
the  part  of  the  employer  disappear? 

Now  let  us  examine  further  the  sheet  which  gives 
these  progress  records.  The  standard  of  weight  be- 
ing 32lt>,  we  mark  this  100,  using  the  same  basis  of 
marking  as  is  used  in  any  other  educational  institu- 
tion, lib  heavy  and  lib  light  being  marked  80. 

As  with  the  "Total  Weight"  we  naturally  must 
carry  an  average  to  date  on  this  record.  How  this  is 
done,  can  be  readily  understood  from  the  entries  and 
needs  no  explanation.  The  same  method  is  used  for 
marking  the  "Moisture  Records,"  except  that  in  this 
case  we  mark  8  percent  moisture  content  100  and  i 
percent  more  or  less  80,  the  average  to  date  for  the 
shift  being  cumulative  also. 

Finally  this  figure  is  entered  up  under  "Da£"  in 
the  progress  record  attached  to  the  graphical  charts. 
This,  together  with  the  cumulative  weight  record, 
forms  the  record  for  the  day  (the  two  being  aver- 
aged). These  sheets  are  checked  up  by  the  research 
department  to  make  sure  that  they  are  free  from  errors, 
as  the  men  have  no  confidence  in  records  they  feel 
are  not  accurate.  The  chart  on  the  bottom  of  the 
sheet  is  then  torn  off  and  the  three  for  each  machine 
(one  for  each  shift),  are  posted  on  a  bulletin  board 
in  the  machine  room.  The  record  having  the  best 
period  average  appears  first,  as  indicated  on  the  ac- 
companying charts.  (See  Plates  II,  III  and  IV.) 

The  period  is  four  weeks  and  the  average  to  date 
begins  all  over  again  at  the  end  of  each  four  weeks' 
period.  The  reason  for 'indicating  the  standing  of  the 
men  on  a  period  average  rather  than  the  day's  aver- 
age is  that  it  tends  toward  greater  continuity  of  ef- 
fort, which  is  a  source  of  much  greater  satisfaction 
to  the  workman.  It  is  the  steady  progress  that  really 
counts  and  not  the  spasmodic,  spectacular  high  record 
for  any  one  day.  The  record,  to  give  joy  to  the 
worker,  must  reflect  the  constant,  steady  inner  urge 
which  indicates  the  degree  of  his  mastery  of  the  forces 
he  controls  in  the  day's  work. 

The  improvement  in  the  records  from  October  16 
(made  about  a  week  after  the  recording  commenced) 
to  November  27  is  very  noticeable.  The  records  of 
May  10,  however,  show  how  completely  the  men  be- 
came the  masters  of  the  machine.  From  the  first  three 
records  (of  October  16)  it  is  evident  that  the  machine 
was  more  or  less  controlling  the  men  who  really 
formed  a  part  of  it.  In  the  last  three  records  (of  May 
10),  however,  the  machine  was  completely  under  con- 
trol and  was  literally  an  instrument  for  expressing 
the  degree  of  the  man's  mastery  of  the  science  and  art 
of  making  paper.  The  difference  is  enormous! 

The  three  sets  of  records  of  the  same  machines, 
and  machine  crews,  on  three  different  dates  show  the 
actual  results  obtained,  and  I  would  like  to  call  your 
attention  to  the  last  three  of  May  10.  (See  Plate  IV). 
You  will  note  that  while  at  first  there  was  quite  a 
range  of  difference  between  the  men,  that  on  May  10 
the  records  were  89.2,  88.9  and  88.9  respectively. 
This  shows  very  clearly  that  the  spirit  of  friendly  ri- 
valry and  competition  will  increase  rather  than  dimin- 
ish, if  only  the  progress  records  are  made  interest- 
ing and  do  reflect  the  quality  of  the  work.  The  old 
idea  that  competition  in  the  sense  of  making  money 
is  the  mainspring  of  every  man's  activity,  is  passing 
out,  for  we  are  realizing  that  the  possessive  instinct 


which  economists  over  emphasized  in  the  past  is  giv- 
ing place  to  the  creative  instinct.  Competition  from 
the  purely  money-making  sense  is  not  the  life  of  trade, 
but  rather  the  reverse. 

\\  e  do  not  pay  a  man  more  money  for  a  good  rec- 
ord but  pay  the  prevailing  union  scale  for  all  posi- 
tions in  our  plants.  These  are  adjusted  each  spring 
by  joint  conferences  with  our  men.  In  this  way  we 
keep  a  proper  wage  balance  between  the  different 
classes  of  work  in  proportion  to  the  skill  required 
and  as  a  consequence  avoid  all  the  innumerable  dif- 
ficulties which  confront  the  piece  work  system,  task 
and  bonus  plan  and  all  other  direct  payment  methods. 
It  is  often  argued  that  it  is  not  right  to  pay  a  good 
man  the  same  rate  as  a  poor  man  and  to  this  I  ab- 
solutely agree,  but  the  fact  is  that  when  these  progress 
records  are  furnished  to  men,  all  men  in  a  certain 
operating  class  finally  come  to  be  practically  equal  in 
performance  and  the  differences  will  be  only  between 
the  amount  of  skill  required  in  each  different  class  of 
work  and  in  these  classes  there  is  a  difference  in  com- 
pensation. Proof  of  this  statement  is  brought  out  by 
the  three  records  of  May  10;  but  for  those  who  do 
not  wish  to  take  so  few  examples  as  conclusive,  1 
would  like  to  say  that  it  has  been  my  experience  that 
invariably  the  competition  is  keen  enough  on  all  qual- 
ity records  to  bring  nearly  all  men,  (who  have  been  at 
the  work  a  sufficient  length  of  time  to  become  ex- 
pert) practically  to  the  same  degree  of  proficiency. 

Every  organization  should  encourage  its  employees 
to  progress  from  one  class  to  another,  so  as  to  have 
as  many  "all-round"  men  in  its  employ  as  possible, 
and  it  has  been  our  experience  that  you  can  practical- 
ly always  convince  a  man  who  asks  for  more  than 
his  particular  job  is  worth,  that  the  way  to  get  more 
pay  is  so  to  master  his  own  job  that  he  can  be  pro- 
moted to  a  higher  class.  Men  have  confidence  in  a 
company  where  promotion  from  the  ranks  is  the  rule. 

Perhaps  some  principle  of  paying  men  an  increa..* 
of  a  certain  amount  per  hour  for  each  month's  con- 
tinuous service  can  be  worked  out  between  certain 
maximum  and  minimum  rates.  A  man  would  then 
start  in  at  a  fixed  minimum  per  hour  and  advance  au- 
tomatically to  a  maximum  rate  representing  the  value 
of  his  particular,  occupation  as  decided  upon  in  joint 
conference  between  the  employer  and  employee.  This 
principle  is  not  new  in  unionism,  and  is  even  now  op- 
erative in  some  trades. 

You  will  notice  that  on  the  record  of  May  10  there 
appears  a  "uniformity  record"  which  was  not  on  the 
records  of  October  16  and  November  27  (although 
for  the  sake  of  explaining  its  method  of  computation 
it  was  shown  on  the  large  record  sheet).  This  was 
added  because  the  machine  tenders  themselves  wanted 
us  to  find  some  way  of  measuring  how  near  they  came 
!o  having  the  weight  across  the  sheet  uniform.  The 
third  column  marked  "Uniformity  Record"  (Plate  i) 
previously  referred  to,  shows  how  this  record  is  kept. 
It  will  be  noticed  that  the  three  weights  are  30.75,  29. 
and  28.75  the  front,  middle  and  back  of  the  sheet, 
respectively.  In  obtaining  this  uniformity  record,  we 
take  thfi  middle  weight  as  the  normal,  to  which  the 
other  two  are  referred,  and  for  each  l/^lb  from  the 
normal  (not  average)  we  take  off  10  points.  In  this 
case  29  happens  to  be  normal,  therefore, 
30.75  =  30 
28.75  =  90 

Total.  .120 
Average  60 


10 


Til II  CREATIVE  WORKMAN 


You  will  notice  we  have  kept  a  number  of  other 
lines  in  the  progress  record  attached  to  the  charts. 
We  did  this  realizing  we  would  be  sure  to  have  re- 
quests from  our  men  for  other  factors  which  they 
would  like  recorded,  and  while  we  have  not  had  time 
to  work  them  out  as  yet,  we  have  already  had  a 
number  of  suggestions.  'We  find  that  the  greater 
number  of  factors  or  laws  that  we  record,  the  greater 


and  that  we  should  find  some  way  of  recording  the 
thickness  at  these  points.  We  found  that  to  do  this 
we  had  to  increase  the  amount  of  agitation  in  the  pulp 
storage  tanks,  and  as  a  result  are  making  some  radical 
improvements  which  will  tend  to  produce  greater  uni- 
formity throughout  the  entire  process.  Right  here  it 
might  be  well  to  call  attention  to  the  fact  that  our 
experience  has  beeh  that  men  do  not  have  to  be  stiimi- 


Form  M-l. 


BACK  TENDERS  MOISTURE  RECOR, 


A/OI/.30. 


No.    1   Machine. 

No.    2  Machine. 

Mams 

Moisture 

Progress. 
Record. 

Name 

Moisture    Progress 
Record. 

Day  - 

Period 

Day 

Peri  o  ! 

Day 

Period 

Day 

Per  ion 

tJ  OAN/S 

78 

77 

$4j 

94:2 

FRENCH 

77 

78 

BZ7 

33.1 

M^CLELLANTL 

8.3 

78 

8Z? 

83.8 

ANDREWS 

74 

r.(5~ 

ReAunoiN 

7.3 

7.G 

S&3 

83.3 

T/W-LON 

74 

T.Z 

84.2 

$  C^t  \j 

is  the  interest  in  the  work,  because  it  brings  to  bear 
upon  the  problem  a  greater  amount  of  thought. 

The  "basis  weight"  and  "moisture  test"  records  had 
only  been  operating  a  short  time  when  the  machine- 
lenders  called  our  attention  to  the  fact  that  they  could 
get  better  results  if  the  stock  thickness  or  density 
furnished  them  by  the  beater  room  was  more  uniform. 


lated  to  make  suggestions  by  offering  prizes.  They  are 
glad  to  suggest  improvements,  for  in  this  way  they  are 
helping  to  create  conditions  in  the  plant  which  help 
them  to  get  better  results  (the  results  being  indicated 
by  their  progress  records).  Then,  too,  they  are  sure 
to  receive  recognition  for  their  suggestions,  for  the 
foreman  knows  our  judgment  of  his  ability  depends 


torn  M-l. 


BACK   TENDERS  MOISTURE  RECORD 

Date 


/9/Q 


No.    1    Machine. 

No.    2  Machine. 

Mame 

Mo  i-sture 

Progress. 
Record. 

Name 

Moisture     Progress 
Record 

Day 

Period 

Day 

Period 

Day 

Period 

Day 

Period 

FO&TI/ME 

8.0 

8.0 

3^3 

a5tf 

C/0X7/VAS 

ao. 

A? 

&td\ 

&?! 

MCC_L£LLAAL[L- 

8.1 

7-8 

92.7 

S20 

.AMDAEWS 

73 

7B 

350 

&/& 

~MAB£±LLJLnQN_ 

3.0 

7.8 

94.4 

80.2 

FRENCH 

8.0 

78 

95.6 

ei.B 

They  asked  us  to  find  some  way  to  measure  the  thick- 
ness of  the  stock  so  that  the  beater  engineer  could  do 
his  work  more  intelligently.  As  a  result  of  this  sug- 
gestion and  after  discussing  the  matter  with  the  beater 
engineer,  our  research  department  has  tackled  the 
problem  of  measuring  this  stock  thickness  and  it  is 
now  practically  solved.  The  beater  engineer  imme- 
diately suggested  to  us  that  the  variation  in  the  stock 
thickness  which  was  furnished  him  by  the  sulphite 
pulp  mill  and  groundwood  pulp  mill  was  not  uniform, 


largely  upon  how  he  succeeds  in  getting  his  men  to 
use  their  brains.  He  naturally  hastens  to  give  credit 
for  all  suggestions  made.  Of  course,  it  goes  without 
saying  that  this  greater  uniformity  is  bound  to  result 
not  only  in  a  better  quality  of  paper,  but  in  increased 
output  as  well;  in  fact  our  Sturgeon  Falls  mill,  with- 
out making  any  changes  in  the  speed  of  the  paper 
machines,  has  already  increased  its  output  over  5 
percent  as  a  consequence  of  more  uniform  operating 
conditions. 


II 


THE  CREATIVE  WORKMAN 


We  have  further  made  the  discovery  that  what  we 
call  the  slowness  or  freeness  of  the  stock  has  quite  a 
bearing  on  the  quality  of  the  paper  as  it  comes  oi'f  the 
paper  machines,  and  as  a  result  we  adopted  a  method 
which  would  record  this  slowness  and  freeness. 
By  free  stock  I  mean  stock  that  the  water  leaves  ra- 
pidly and  by  slow  stock  a  stock  which  the  water  leaves 
slowly.  We  found  incidentally  that  this  slowness  and 
freeness  is  one  of  the  best  indexes  of  the  quality  of 
the  groundvvood  pulp,  and  we  are  now  working  upon 
a  series  of  factors  which  will  record  the  operations 
of  the  grinders  upon  which  the  wood  blocks  are  re- 
duced to  pulp.  This  work  has  always  been  one  of  the 
most  uninteresting  and  monotonous  jobs  in  the  plant, 
but  from  the  small  amount  of  work  we  have  already 
been  able  to  do,  we  find  increasing  interest  upon  the 
part  of  the  worker,  and  I  feel  free  to  prophesy  that 
when  these  several  factors  have  been  recorded,  we  will 
convert  this  into  one  of  the  most  interesting  jobs  in 
the  plant.  I  base  this  prophecy  on  my  previous  ex- 
perience at  the  Burgess  Sulphite  Fiber  Company 
where  we  recorded '  hundreds  of  operations.  These 
records  we  found  to  be  grouped  under  three  general 
classes:  quantity  records,  qualify  iv-cords  and  economy 
(or  cost)  records.  Quality  records  (which  occupy 
the  middle  position),  are,  perhaps,  of  the  greatest  im- 
portance for  they  bring  the  individual's  intelligence 
(brain  power)  to  bear  upon  the  problem  and  as  a 
consequence  by  removing  the  obstacles  to  uniformity 
of  quality,  remove  at  the  same  time  the  obstructions 
to  increased  output.  The  creative  power  of  the 
human  mind  is,  however,  not  content  simply  to  pro- 
duce the  best  quality  under  existing  conditions  of 
plant  operation.  So  the  desire  to  create  new  condi- 
tions for  the  more  highly  specialized  working  out  of 
the  natural  laws  of  the  process,  demands  expression 
and  this  expression  at  once  takes  the  form  of  sugges- 
tions for  improvements  in  mechanical  devices. 

This  desire  contains  within  it  the  germ  of  economic 
thought  which  will  unfold  and  express  itself  eventu- 
ally in  a  request  for  cost  records,  and  the  organization 
that  neglects  its  opportunity  to  satisfy  this  desire  is 
overlooking  one  of  the  great  avenues  leading  toward 
intelligent  productive  effort. 

Because  of  the  interrelation  of  Quality,  Quantity 
and  Economy  records,  any  complete  record  of  indivi- 
dual progress  must,  of  course,  take  them  all  into  ac- 
count. However,  as  this  is  not  always  practical  we 
have  at  least  one  of  three  ways  of  measuring  progress 
always  open  to  us. 

As  further  illustrating  the  necessity  for  giving  in- 
dividual records  to  the  men,  we  discovered  that  the 
Lacktenders  who  sometimes  work  on  other  shifts  than 
their  regular  ones  lost  interest  in  their  records  to  a  cer- 
tain extent  when  on  a  different  shift  and,  therefore,  a 
request  came  to  keep  the  backtenders'  records  sepa- 
rately, so  that  no  matter  what  machinetender  he  hap- 
pened to  be  working  for,  his  record  would  follow  him. 
This  was  done,  and  the  two  records  of  November  30 
and  May  10  reproduced  herewith,  show  clearly  not 
only  the  gains  made  but  the  increasing  competition 
for  a  good  record.  I  would  like  to  say  that  other  fac- 
tors under  control  of  the  backtenders  have  been  al- 
ready suggested  for  recording,  and  these  we  are  plan- 
ing to  work  upon  as  soon  as  our  Research  Depart- 
ment has  had  time  to  develop  a  plan. 

We  had  an  interesting  experience  with  one  of  our 
backtenders  which  illustrates  how  men  appreciate 
these  progress  records.  At  Sturgeon  Falls  we  have 


two  small  120  in.  machines.  At  Sault  Ste.  Marie  our 
narrowest  machine  is  164  in.  and  the  widest  198  in. 
Whenever  we  have  openings  on  these  wide  machines, 
which  pay  more  money  for  backtenders,  we  like  to 
advance  our  own  men.  One  of  our  men  went  from 
Sturgeon  Falls  to  the  "Soo."  His  machinetender, 
who  told  me  the  story,  said  he  noticed  this  man  ran 
his  paper  much  more  uniformly  than  any  backtender 
he  had  ever  had  as  regards  moisture  test.  Upon  in- 
quiring where  he  had  learned  to  run  paper  so  uniform- 
ly, he  explained  that  it  was  at  Sturgeon  Falls,  where 
they  had  a  "scheme"  for  letting  backtenders  know 
just  what  the  moisture  was  every  time  a  reel  was 
changed.  He  said  the  scheme  was  "great"  and  he 
hoped  they  would  start  this  same  thing  at  the  "Soo." 

I  referred  to  the  fact  that  mistakes  in  records  cause 
a  lack  of  confidence.  It  may  interest  you  to  know 
how  we  overcame  this  trouble  by  giving  "accuracy" 
records  to  the  "sample  tester."  This  was  done  by  hav- 
ing the  Research  Department  check  over  the  number 
of  mistakes  made  each  day  in  the  "reel  record"  sheets. 
A  perfect  score  with  no  mistakes  we  call  100;  2.^/2 
points  were  taken  off  for  every  mistake.  An  average 
of  eight  or  ten  mistakes  a  day  was  a  common  occur- 
rence and  almost  immediately  this  changed  so  that 
today  a  mistake  is  decidedly  the  exception  rather  than 
the  rule. 

At  the  Burgess  plant  (and  we  are  now  develop- 
ing the  same  system  at  our  Canadian  mills),  the  same 
principle  of  developing  the  individuality  of  each  man 
was  extended  right  up  to  the  department  heads,  who 
have  complete  records  including  cost  sheets  of  the 
operations  of  their  departments.  We  also  developed 
a  system  of  reports  for  the  maintenance  and  construc- 
tion crews  by  giving  the  men  records  showing  the  cost 
of  jobs  that  they  were  working  on,  together  with  de- 
tailed figures  of  the  cost  of  all  the  materials  they 
were  using.  The  saving,  because  of  the  creative  power 
released,  through  the  aid  of  these  records,  was  enor- 
mous, and  the  fact  that  our  men  did  this  for  us  with- 
out being  paid  on  a  piece-work  system,  or  a  task  or 
bonus  plan,  demonstrates,  it  seems  to  me,  conclusive- 
ly that  men  instinctively  desire  to  do  the  right  thing, 
and  do  not  have  to  be  bribed  (as  a  workman  once  ex- 
pressed it  to  me)  to  do  good  work.  It  is  unnat- 
ural for  men  to  work  in  a  negative  and  de- 
structive manner  and  the  fact  that  so  much  of  this 
sort  of  work  is  done  is  not  so  much  a  reflection  on  the 
individual  workman  as  it  is  upon  the  manager  who 
has  failed  to  create  an  environment  in  which  a  man 
can  work  intelligently. 

Is  it  not,  perhaps,  unfair  to  the  workman  to  hold  the 
"almighty  dollar"  constantly  before  him  and  thereby 
stimulate  his  selfish  instincts  ?  Our  experience  at  least 
has  demonstrated  that  it  is  better  to  reward  merit  by 
promotion  and  to  pay  a  regular  hourly  rate  of 
wages ;  then  by  means  of  progress  records  to  help  him 
measure  the  result  of  his  efforts  in  such  a  manner 
that  he  is  consciously  increasing  his  knowledge  of  the 
work.  There  will  be  no  lack  of  cooperation  in  the 
plant  where  these  principles  are  used,  for  goodwill 
which  is  based  on  knowledge  will  build  up  an  esprit 
de  corps,  which  is  not  a  purely  emotional  thing  that 
may  disappear  "over  night."  It  is  rather  a  spirit  which 
recognizes  consciously  the  universality  of  law  and  the 
stability  of  things  generally. 

Of  course,  such  vital  questions  as  steadiness  of  em- 
ployment, cost  of  living,  and  justice  in  division  of 


12 


THE  CREATIVE  WORKMAN 


profits — the  public  included — must  be  solved.  The 
solution,  however,  requires  democratic  cooperation 
between  employer  and  employee  and  the  elimination 
therefore  of  every  form  of  paternalism.  The  work- 
man must  have  a  chance  to  express  his  individuality, 
and  the  degree  of  conscious  self-expression  which  he 
can  attain  is  in  direct  proportion  to  the  ability  of  the 
organization  to  measure,  for  his  benefit,  the  impress  of 
his  personality  upon  it.  The  most  democratic  indus- 
trial plant,  therefore,  is  the  one  which  permits  the  ful- 
lest amount  of  individual  freedonf  to  each  member, 
irrespective  of  his  position  and,  at  the  same  time,  is 
so  sensitively  adjusted  that  it  reflects  immediately  the 
effect  of  his  actions.  If  his  actions  result  in  injury 
to  others  he  will  see  that,  as  a  part  of  the  whole,  he 
himself  must  also  suffer.  An  organization  of  this 
kind  can  never  be  used  by  the  employer  to  exploit  the 
employee,  for  it  will  be  continually  demonstrating  to 
both  that  the  success  of  any  one  part  of  the  organiza- 
tion is  absolutely  dependent  upon  that  of  every  other 
part,  and  therefore  upon  the  success  of  the  whole. 

In  conclusion  I  would  like  to  call  your  attention  to 
the  fact  that  the  great  life  movement  (which  brought 
industry  into  existence)  is  not  to  be  recognized  in  its 
stationary  aspect,  i.e.,  as  it  is  crystallized  into  the 
forms  of  things  which  we  can  possess,  but  in  its  work- 


ing, moving  aspect  that  constantly  tends  toward  a 
fuller,  and  more  complete  expression  of  life.  To  be 
conscious,  however,  this  expression  must  at  the  same 
lime  be  individual,  so  in  its  working  through  human- 
ity it  can  only  come  to  its  highest  state  of  develop- 
ment through  self-expression,  i.e.,  by  release  of  in- 
dividualized creative  power.  This  is  the  reason  why, 
as  our  knowledge  of  the  great  forces  of  nature  in- 
creases, we  desire  more  and  more  to  express  this 
knowledge  in  the  creation  of  conditions  (or  particu- 
lar situations)  in  which  we  can  observe  these  forces 
in  action,  and  especially  where  this  action  records  the 
degree  of  our  mastery  oi  the  law. 

As  we  come  into  a  consciousness  of  the  unity  of  all 
life,  and  see  the  expression  of  this  unity  in  the  uni- 
versality of  the  laws  of  nature,  we  know  that  freedom 
to  express  this  knowledge  in  creative  work  is  the  only 
real  freedom. 

Have  we  not  a  right  then,  to  assume  that  the  pos- 
sessive instinct,  which  has  caused  so  much  unhappi- 
ness  in  the  past,  is  influencing  our  lives  less  and  less 
each  day>  and  that  the  creative,  which  is  the  impulse 
back  of  all  healthy  growth,  is  coming  to  be  more 
and  more  the  quickening  influence,  not  only  in  the 
lives  of  our  leaders,  but  also  in  the  lives  of  the  work- 
men as  well  ? 


Discussion  of  Mr.  Wolfs  Address 


Afternoon  Sitting 

Thursday,  May  16,  1918 

HENRY  P.  CARRUTH,  President,  in  the  Chair. 
After  the  meeting  was  opened,  the  secretary  announced  a 
l>ai>cr  by  Otto  Kress  and  George  C.  McNaughton  on  "The 
Ktfcct  <>1  Varying  Humidities  on  the  Strength  of  Fiber  Board 
;uid  its  Component  Plies,"  which  he  recommended  to  be  read 
by  title,  unless  there  was  time  later  in  the  afternoon.  Presi- 
<frnt  Carruth  then  introduced  Robert  B.  Wolf  who  addressed 
the  meeting  on  "Results  Obtained  in  Recording  of  Operations 
on  Paper  Machines,"  his  remarks  being  illustrated  by  stere- 
opticon  views  of  progress  records,  charts,  curves,  etc.  The 
revised  text  of  Mr.  Wolf's  address  is  published  in  this  issue 
as  a  separate  article.  The  discussion  which  followed  the  ex- 
hibition of  slides  is  reported  below,  as  follows : 

MR.  FLETCHER — You  raised  a  point  there  where  you  called 
attention  to  the  fact  that  the  men  were  far  apart  at  the  be- 
ginning and  close  together  at  the  end.  That  struck  me  as 
very  interesting.  Naturally  the  men  were  working  for  a 
good  record.  Now,  as  a  man  goes  off  a  shift,  he  usually  does 
not  inform  the  man  that  follows  him  of  the  condition  of  the 
machine.  All  of  us  who  handle  machines  know  that  there 
is  quite  a  variation;  that  it  takes  a  few  minutes  for  you  to 
pick  -up  information  regarding  the  condition  of  the  stock. 
Now,  if  the  men  could  realize  the  service  they  might  render 
by  informing  each  other,  they  would  keep  themselves  in  closer 
touch  with  the  work,  and  if  this  was  done  on  all  three  shifts 
it  would  improve  operating  conditions.  Unfortunately  this 
friendly  spirit  does  not  ordinarily  exist.  How  do  you  find 
it  where  you  keep  these  records? 

MR.  WOLF — We  found,  Mr.  Fletcher,  that  when  we  changed 
our  records  from  a  quantity  to  a  quality  basis  that  we  always 
got  a  friendly  spirit  of  rivalry  instead  of  an  unfriendly  one. 
It  is  not  exactly  what  you  would  call  a  "sporting  spirit,"  but 
the  kind  of  spirit  which  enters  into  a  game  which  requires 
brain  power.  The  competition  which  results  has  in  it  most 
decidedly  the  element  of  fair  play,  which  is  usually  lacking 
where  the  competition  is  on  the  basis  of  physical  production 
only. 

TOM  HARVEY — How  often  do  you  take  the  samples  for  rec- 
ords of  weight  and  moisture? 

MR.  WOLF — They  are  taken  every  time  a  reel  changes;  that 
is  about  every  thirty-five  minutes. 

MR.  HARVEY — Through  the  entire  twenty- four  hours? 

MR.  WOLF — Yes;  we  have  a  man  on  each  shift  for  every 
two  paper  machines.  As  mentioned  previously,  these  men 
are  members  of  the  labor  organizations;  naturally  there  is 
no  feeling  that  we  have  some  sort  of  a  "follow-up"  system 
but  that  the  entire  function  of  the  records  is  to  give  more 
information  to  the  machine  crews  in  order  to  enable  them 
to  do  their  work  to  better  advantage. 

(A  member  made  inquiry  at  this  point  regarding  the  con- 
trol of  the  moisture  test,  but  the  exact  phraseology  of  his 
query  could  not  be  made  out  by  the  stenographer.) 

MR.  WOLF — Personally,  I  do  not  approve  of  automatic  reg- 
ulation of  stock  going  to  the  paper  machines  unless  it  saves 
men.  I  think  it  is  much  better  to  give  the  man  a  chance  to 
control  the  machine  than  to  have  it  automatically  controlled 
for  him. 

A  MEMBER — I  mean  the  drying  end. 

MR.  WOLF— It  seems  to  me  it  is  much  better  if  the  back- 
tender  regulates  the  drying  of  paper  by  hand.  Our  experi- 
ence is  if  we  furnish  the  machine  with  uniform  stock  that 
there  is  very  little  difficulty  about  proper  regulation  of  the 
drying;  in  other  words,  the  changes  are  so  gradual  and  slight 
that  they  can  be  easily  controlled.  And  here  again,  Why 
deprive  the  backtender  of  the  privilege  of  controlling  his 
operation  personally? 

A  MEMBER — I  understood  you  to  say  you  regulate  the  dens- 
ity of  the  stock.  Do  you  do  that  automatically? 

MR.  WOLF  \Vc  have  not  started  this  stock  thickness  regu- 
lation, but  are  installing  two  Trimby  regulators  for  regulat- 
ing the  uniformity  of  the  stock  in  the  storage  tanks,  from 
which  it  is  pumped  to  the  beaters. 

MR.  HARVEY— Your  process  is  a  comparatively  simple  one. 
You  are  running  with  just  one  stuff  pump  and  one  stuff  box 


board  we  have  as  many  as  seven  machines  combined  in  one, 
there  are  seven  chests,  seven  stuff  pumps  and  seven  stuff 
boxes  to  regulate.  It  is  a  well  known  fact,  the  thinner  the 
paper  we  are  making,  the  faster  the  machine  is  running,  the 
less  variation  you  will  have  in  weights.  Our  machines  in- 
stead of  running  paper  at  24x36 — 3olt>,  or  for  example  four 
one-thousandths  thick  and  running  600  ft.  a  minute  run  prob- 
ably 100  ft.  a  minute  on  paper  which  gauges  .030  thVk,  so  we 
have  considerable  more  trouble  in  keeping  our  weights  cor- 
rect than  you  have  on  a  news  machine  or  book  machine  and 
this  variation  .of  weight  is  probably  caused  by  the  variation 
of  the  density  in  the  stock.  Is  it  possible  to  regulate  the 
density  of  that  stock  automatically  ? 

MR.  WOLF — Yes,  absolutely.  Mr.  Rhodes  of  the  Interna- 
tional Paper  Company,  who  is  here,  I  believe  has  had  some 
experience  with  this  regulator.  Would  you  kindly  tell  us 
about  it,  Mr.  Rhodes? 

MR.  RHODES — I  don't  see  why  the  regulator  that  Mr.  Wolf 
is  speaking  of  wouldn't  operate  the  same  for  board  machines. 
Do  you  use  a  weight  regulator  on  the  machine? 

MH.  WOLF — No,  \ve  have  not  used  weight  regulators  on  our 
machines. 

MR.  HARVEY — We  furnish  them  three  or  four  different 
kinds  of  stock. 

MR.  WOLF — One  man  runs  all  kinds? 
MR.  HARVEY — Yes. 

MR.  WOLF — Why  not  have  a  different  standard  to  work  to 
for  each  order,  calling  the  normal  weight  or  the  weight  de- 
sired 100,  varying  the  moisture  test  in  accordance  with  re- 
quirements; for  instance,  our  standard  on  hanging  paper 
instead  of  being  8  percent  moisture  is  6  percent. 

MR.  HARVEY — What  I  am  getting  at,  the  variation  of  the 
weight  and  thickness  of  the  paper,  depends  more  on  the 
beater  man  than  it  does  on  the  machine  man,  and  if  we  can 
to  regulate  the  weight  on  your  machines.  In  making  box 
get  away  from  that  variation  of  the  thickness  of  the  stock 
and  variation  of  beating  conditions  we  can  practically  elimin- 
ate all  our  trouble  as  regards  variation  in  weight. 

MR.  WOLF — There  are  instruments  on  the  market  to  record 
the  beating  operation.  I  believe  one  invented  by  the  Eastern 
Manufacturing  Company  and  the  other  by  Mr.  Green,  form- 
erly of  S.  D.  Warren  &  Company. 

A  MEMBER — We  had  great  difficulty  in  getting  the  stock  to 
a  proper  density  in  order  to  measure  it  out  in  the  right  pro- 
portion. 

MR.  WOLF — I  understand  the  Eastern  Manufacturing  Com- 
pany solved  this  problem  by  putting  all  of  their  half  stuff  in 
centrifugal  machines  which  brought  it  to  a  constant  density. 

A  MEMBER — That  _is  what  we  are  doing  now.  We  then 
have  a  record  which  enables  us  to  get  correct  results.  We 
used  a  centrifugal  pump  to  work  up  the  stock ;  that  didn't 
work  very  well.  The  regulation  of  the  beater  is  the  proper 
thing. 

MR.  WOLF — We  have  so  far  not  had  occasion  to  record 
this  operation  along  the  lines  you  mention. 

A  MEMBER — How  about  one  man  leaving  his  shift  without 
leaving  complete  information  as  to  what  has  happened  for 
his  running  mate?  Will  these  records  help  you  in  this? 

MR.  WOLF — They  do.  We  find  when  these  quality  records 
are  posted  that  men  are  always  careful  to  leave  full  informa- 
tion for  those  who  follow  them  on  the  machines.  It  may  in- 
terest you  to  know  that  these  records  are  all  finally  plotted 
together  on  a.  big  record  sheet  which  enables  the  shift  fore- 
men to  compare  the  results  of  their  shifts.  We  also  keep 
individual  records  of  each  machine  which  enables  us  to  cor- 
rect mechanical  difficulties  when  the  records  show  that  tin  M 
exist.  The  whole  idea  of  this  grouping  of  individual  record- 
is  to  get  shift  and  department  records  which  will  reflect  the 
individual  progress  of  the  group  as  well.  Our  progress  rec- 
ords as  a  whole  have  increased  from  the  original  figure  of 
about  70  to  something  over  90.  All  these  records  arc  avail- 
able to  any  man  in  the  organization. 

MR.  CARRUTH — I  would  like  to  inquire  if  you  have 
attempted  to  record  operations  where  the  records  are 
based  on  appearances  and  decided  by  the  personal 
judgment  of  the  "sample  tester."  For  instance,  take  the 
question 'of  finish  or  formation.  This  may  vary  so  much  as 


to  completely  ruin  a  sheet  and  yet  so  far  as  I  know  there  has 
not  yet  been  developed  a  means  of  measuring  it. 

MR.  WOLF — We  have  not  worked  on  this  problem  but  are 
planning  to  do  so,  as  it  is  an  important  factor.  I  believe, 
however,  that  it  will  be  solved  as  soon  as  sufficient  study  has 
been  put  upon  it.  Whenever  records  are  kept,  however,  it 
should  be  borne  in  mind  that  they  should  be  based  upon 
something  exact  and  not  mere  personal  opinion;  otherwise, 
the  men  will  not  have  any  faith  in  them. 

MK.  OBKRMANNS— I  understand  that  the  record  of  the  ma- 
chinetender  is  based  or  determined  by  his  paper  weight  and 
(he  moisture.  How  do  you  ascertain  the  moisture  content? 
It  necessarily  must  be  a  very  fine  instrument  to  determine 
accurately  the  moisture  content  of  a  sheet  of  paper. 

MR.  WOLF — In  order  to  get  more  accurate  results  of  the 
weights,  we  were  obliged  to  design  a  much  more  delicate  scale 
I  ban  was  on  the  market.  The  scale  we  are  using  is  very 
far  superior  to  the  German  quadrant  scale  and  was  designed 
by  Dr.  Thwing  of  the  Thwing  Instrument  Company,  Phila- 
delphia. 

A  MEMBER — How  long  does  it  take  to  make  the  moisture 
test? 

MR.  WOLF — Fifteen  minutes.  It  really  only  takes  ten  to 
dry  out,  but  we  allow  fifteen  to  be  safe.  Perhaps  Mr.  Ship- 
man  will  explain  the  proceedings  in  detail. 

MR.  SHIPMAN — We  at  first  attempted  to  use  a  scale  where 
a  balance  is  effected  by  moving  a  small  rider  back  and  forth 
on  a  beam.  We  found  that  the  sensitiveness  of  such  a  scale 
was  insufficient  for  our  purposes  inasmuch  as,  no  matter  how 
conscientious  the  operator,  weights  varying  by  as  much  as 
half  a  pound  could  be  obtained  on  the  sample  of  paper. 

We  then  decided  that  we  should  have  some  sort  of  direct 
reading  scale.  The  so  called  quadrant  scale  is  not  sensitive 
enough  to  allow  for  moisture  determinations.  By  this,  I  mean 
we  decided  in  order  to  save  time  in  the  manipulation  to  use 
the  wet  and  dry  basis  weights  for  calculating  the  percentage  of 
moisture  in  the  paper.  A  simple  calculation  will  show  that 
if  either  your  wet  or  dry  basis  weights  are  in  error  by  as 
much  as  half  a  pound  that  your  moisture  determination  will 
be  in  error  by  over  I  percent.  Inasmuch  as  your  total  range 
of  moisture  content  is  only  from  around  6.5  percent  to  around 
9  percent  an  error  of  I  percent  is  not  allowable. 

It  was  necessary  therefore  to  design  and  build  an  entirely 
new  type  of  direct  reading  scale  whose  readings  should  be 
sensitive  to  one-tenth  poAind  basis  weight. 

We  have  five  of  these  scales  in  constant  daily  operation  and 
they  are  giving  very  good  satisfaction,  being  both  fast  and 
accurate. 

With  regard  to  the  drying  of  the  samples  of  paper  for 
moisture  determination,  the  problem  was  to  be  able  to  dry 
six  sheets  of  newsprint  24x36  inches  and  do  it  in  fifteen 
minutes  since  the  reels  were  finished  in  about  that  time  on 
the  paper  machines.  The  oven  is  an  ordinary  galvanized  iron 
..  box,  heated  with  two  layers  of  54  inch  steam  coil  to  a  temp- 
erature around  240°  Fahr.  The  air  in  the  machine  room  be- 
ing too  damp  to  fully  dry  the  samples,  we  built  a  small  brick 
chamber,  set  the  oven  on  top  of  it  and  ran  a  pipe  from  the 
bottom  of  the  chamber  to  the  finishing  room  taking  our  air 
through  this  pipe.  In  order  to  make  sure  that  our  air  was 
sufficiently  dry  to  carry  off  the  moisture  quickly  we  built  a 
shallow  box,  twelve  feet  long,  divided  into  two  compartments 
one  over  the  other,  filling  each  compartment  with  quicklime. 
The  air  for  drying  the  samples  is  drawn  through  both  these 


compartments  and  dried  by  contact  with  the  lime.  It  is  tin  u 
blown  by  a  small  2  inch  direct  connected  blower  to  the  brick 
chamber  underneath  the  oven.  In  this  way  a  slight  air  pro- 
sure  is  always  maintained  on  the  oven  so  that  no  damp  air 
from  the  machine  room  can  enter  the  oven  through  the 
cracks  around  the  doors.  An  outlet  on  the  brick  chamber 
allows  for  readings  with  wet  and  dry  bulb  thermometers  t<> 
indicate  when  the  quick  lime  has  been  spent  in  its  absorbing 
power. 

The  above  air-drying  apparatus  was  installed  at  only  one 
of  the  plants  and  tests  are  being  made  with  it  to  determine 
whether  it  is  necessary  to  employ  such  an  apparatus.  This 
point  is  not  yet  fully  determined. 

(At  this  point  a  slide  showing  the  scale  was  thrown  on  the 
screen.) 

MR.  KLUND — With  a  system  of  this  kind  based  ou  the  rec- 
ords of  the  individual  machines,  do  you  find  that  any  jealousy 
exists  between  tenders  of  machines  that  may  be  side  by  side? 
In  our  own  mill  the  tenders  of  adjoining  machines  are  ex- 
pected to  assist  each  other  in  case  of  trouble. 

MR.  WOLF— I  can  only  give  you  the  results  of  our  actual  ex- 
perience. We  never  have  any  of  these  jealousies  which  cause 
hard  feelings  when  the  records  are  on  a  quality  basis.  I  be- 
lieve, as  I  have  said  before,  that  quality  stimulates  the  intel- 
lect, whereas  quantity  does  the  physical  or  lower  animal  na- 
ture. A  man  instinctively  begins  to  realize  that  only  as  he 
cooperates  with  his  fellow  man  can  he  have  the  greatest  pos- 
sible amount  of  freedom  for  his  individual  development. 
This  conception  comes  to  him  through  the  use  of  his  intel- 
lect and  for  this  very  reason  the  quality  records  which  stim- 
ulate the  intellectual  faculties  are  bound  to  produce  in  him 
a  larger  social  consciousness  which  makes  him  less  selfish 
and  more  .anxious  to  cooperate  in  a  larger  way  for  the  bene- 
fit of  the  whole.  When  the  man  in  the  groundwood  mill  be- 
comes conscious  of  the  trouble  he  is  causing  a  man  in  the 
beater  room  if  he  doesn't  run  his  stock  uniformly,  he  nat- 
urally is  more  careful,  especially  if  the  care  that  he  exercise? 
is  being  recorded  for  him  in  the  progress  record.  This  is 
also  true  of  the  man  in  the  beater  room  when  he  becomes 
conscious  of  the  effect  of  his  work  upon  the  machinetender. 
A  spirit  of  unfriendly  rivalry  simply  cannot  exist  in  a  plant 
where  the  "will  of  man"  is  operating  in  this  conscious  manner. 

(This  brought  the  discussion  of  Mr.  Wolf's  paper  to  a 
close,  and  after  making  a  few  announcements  regarding  reg- 
istering, etc.,  Chairman  Carruth  called  upon  George  E.  Wil- 
liamson to  present  his-  paper  on  "Modern  Methods  in  a  Pa- 
per Mill  Boiler  Plant." 

DISCUSSION    OF    BOILER    PLANT    METHODS 

The  following  discussion  of  Mr.  Williamson's  paper,  then 
ensued : 

(The  text  of  Mr.  Williamson's  paper  will  be  found  in  PA- 
PER for  May  22,  1918.) 

MR.  KRESS — The  gentleman  who  was  to  open  the  discussion 
asked  me  to  take  his  place.  There  is  hardly  anything  that  I 
can  add,  and  I  would  like  to  say  that  Mr.  Williamson's  paper 
is  now  open  for  discussion. 

T.  H.  WRIGHT — In  getting  your  records  of  CO*  gases,  do 
you  employ  a  recorder? 

MR.  WILLIAMSON— We  do  not  have  a  recorder.  We  had 
an  old  style  recorder,  which  became  a  nuisance.  We  have 
now  an  ordinary  hand  sampler  and  collector,  and  we  have 
pipes  running  from  each  boiler  uptake  to  our  control  board. 


hsj 


Copyright,  1918,  by  Paper,  Inc.,  New  York 


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